The following news excerpt is one reason corporations should start using verifiable digital signatures. It would be quite reasonable for business news reporting systems to either verify the signatures themselves, and report the releases as valid (*), or for institution and even personal investors to check the signatures. Public keys for companies like Emulex could be posted at their Web sites, even on their stock ticker pages (at Yahoo, CNBC, etc.) (* there's always the issue of trusting the public key, as Web pages can be hacked to insert other keys. But this should be a fractional problem compared to what we see here, and solvable in various ways.) -- begin excerpt-- NEW YORK (Reuters) - An official at data network equipment maker Emulex Corp. (NasdaqNM:EMLX - news) said the company had been the victim of a hoax press release that said the company was restating its earnings, causing the company's shares to plummet more than 50 percent. ``We have not put out a company press release today,'' said Kirk Roller, senior vice president of sales and marketing. ''Someone put out a release that looks like an Emulex release, using the Emulex name and logo.'' Bill Meehan, chief market analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald said the fake statement said the chief executive officer had resigned and the company had been forced to restate 1998 and 1999 earnings and revise the fourth-quarter to a loss from a gain. Shares dove, and were down 48-1/16 at 65 when they were halted for trade at about 10:30. -- ---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---- Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, ComSec 3DES: 831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, "Cyphernomicon" | black markets, collapse of governments.
